The US's socialist movement is still too small and marginalized to take power. We typically can't even win local elections, let alone national ones; we just don't have the votes. Outside of the electoral arena, we can only win limited, temporary victories within the narrow political spaces of resistance and dissent that the powerful haven't decided to crack down on. Protest and discourse activism remains trapped in symbolism. Consumer activism is almost always futile. The labor movement is on its knees, and it's going to stay there until enough workers develop class consciousness.

What all of this means is that if socialists want to at least slow down industrial civilization's descent into the horrors of late capitalism - at least enough to buy us some time - we have to make tactical alliances with non-socialists.

Plenty of people who are far more intelligent and eloquent than I am have made this case at length, so I'm not going to go into it here. If you want to know why Marxists should do things like "make deals" and "negotiate", read what Marx had to say about what is "achievable within the framework of capitalism". If you want to know why Marxists should form alliances with other people, read some Gramsci or whatever. The case for coalition and compromise has been laid out so exhaustively that there's really no need to relitigate it here.

Liberalism: not a good look

Here, I simply want to point out that for the socialist, cooperation with liberalism is a compromise. It is a terrible compromise. Liberalism is not some off-brand version of socialism or some kind of Diet Socialism: it is a distinct, hideous, antiquated ideology that is responsible for tremendous oppression and suffering all over the world. The great hope of the socialist is not to make peace with liberalism or to seek some kind of accomodation with it: we must annihilate liberalism, root and branch.

At a bare minimum, liberals are definitionally capitalists. They do not ultimately believe in the absolute democratic sovereignty of the people over the commonwealth; they believe that there are cases where individuals have a "right" to do whatever they want with property, whether everyone else agrees with it or not. For the reasons so persuasively laid out by Marx, this kind of economic system inevitably leads to massive and increasing oppression, immiseration and exploitation. No matter what technocratic fixes and policy band-aids liberals invent to get around this, their ideological committment to private property functions as a guarantee of endless, escalating destruction. Their gross, primitive ideas destroy lives and destroy the earth.

If you take Marx seriously, you should find liberalism horrifying and repulsive. Did a liberal just bring up meritocracy? Think of sweatshops. Is a liberal red-baiting? Think of US bombings in Southeast Asia. Is a liberal fetishizing entrepreneurs? Think Ron Paul berating the poor for not bootstrapping themselves out of poverty. Is a liberal fetishizing science and technology as solutions to political problems? Think polar bears starving to death and decomposing as climate change evaporates our sea ice while we wait for our green-energy-deus-ex-machina.

Compassion for the victims

None of this is to argue against the need for popular-front coalition building with liberals when necessary - but it should go far in explaining why a socialist would meet such alliances with skepticism and suspicion. A socialist with any minimal sense of decency and integrity will find the beliefs of their liberal allies absolutely monstrous, just as she would find disagreeable an alliance with any other bigot or reactionary.

Socialists should also recognize that the distinct ideology of liberalism implies distinct goals and thus distinct political incentives and priorities. In 2016, for example, faced with the dangerous candidacy of Donald Trump, liberals insisted on running an unusually weak and vulnerable opponent rather than one who was much more popular. One can, of course, always explain this as a kind of mass error, but that misses the fact that liberals had an incentive to make this kind of mistake. If you are a liberal, you have a personal interest in risking defeat for the sake of putting a liberal in office. Socialists, of course, have a symetrical set of incentives, but that just affirms the point: liberals and socialists are not necessarily reliable allies.

And what that means is that among other things, liberals may be willing at any moment to break the terms of the popular front alliance if they think they can gain from it. Substantively, for the liberal, this will necessarily mean a betrayal right at the fracture-point of the liberal-left coalition: their commitment to capitalism.

Again: there are times when socialists will have to risk that betrayal anyway, particularly for the sake of building a popular front to defeat fascism. But this is a terrible risk to take, and an extremely hard one if you care about the victims of capitalism and want to end its oppression once and for all. Instead of hectoring each other for our lack of tactical savvy and our occasional failures to bite the bullet, comrades should be understanding about this. For the socialist, hostility to liberalism comes not from a place of factionalism or piousness or short-sightedness - it comes from compassion for the lives and the world that capitalism is destroying every day. And if you can't understand the contempt your comrades have for liberalism, it's possible that you are, yourself, a liberal.

The Moscow Project is dedicated to investigating the extent, nature, and purpose of Trump’s ties to the Kremlin—but we need your help. By scouring the internet to investigate allegations, donating to fund our research, or sharing our findings on Twitter and Facebook, you can help uncover the truth about Trump and Russia.

I'm on record insisting that I'd be fine with some basic Congressional investigation into actual conflicts of interest in the Trump Administration relating to Russia - as long as we can be bothered to investigate the same thing with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Goldman Sachs, and all of the other obvious candidates as well. But this, of course, falls far short of that, since Tanden's CAP cares much more about some conflicts of interest than others, for obvious reasons.

And even on the narrow grounds of a limited investigation of Russian "ties", this is absolutely absurd. CAP is not going to dig up anything even approaching interesting or actionable information by crowdsourcing research to amateur Googlers. The only kind of information here that could possibly matter is information you obtain with wiretaps and hard drive seizures and subpoenas. Sorry Neera, it's not sitting on Wikipedia.

What makes this effort so monstrous is that CAP knows all of this perfectly well. The point of The Moscow Project isn't to gather intelligence; the point is to foment paranoia by investing a deputized public into their kabuki "investigation", to use Russophobia to build opposition against Trump, and of course, to fundraise off of all of this. The CAP sees this as a chance to score political points and win donations, but as I wrote back in August, they're playing an increasingly dangerous game:

Liberals may be comfortable with shrugging off racism against the Russian people as a trivial or necessary evil, but they are playing with fire. The social and psychological forces that animate any form of racism are hard to rein in once they've been unleashed, and they can easily metastasize into forms of bigotry that are even more widespread and oppressive.

It's hard to escape the impression that this is exactly what is happening. Even the name of this initiative casually implicates an entire city in whatever sinister machinations liberals think are going on here; it's now impossible to distinguish the way liberals say "Moscow" from the way right-wingers say "Chicago" or "The Middle East". The project only works by completely untethering public interest in Russia from material facts and stoking a suspicion that something is sinister about these Russians, something that we haven't quite figured out yet but that maybe you can figure out, if you spend enough time worrying about it.

Brian Beutler warns that Republicans Should Fear What Democrats Will Do When They Return to Power. American politics, he writes, have proceeded on the "presumption that only Republicans are entitled to maximal demonstrations of power"; thus, we are on the cusp of the absolute dismantling of Obamacare, with no regard for its substantial support among much of America. But if Republicans follow through with this, Beutler writes, Democrats will abandon their "concern for achieving liberal goals through normal means"; and once back in power, we can expect a liberalism that "dispenses with all the pleasantries and enacts a simple, truly universal plan, like Medicare for all...by any margin".

Reading this, I can't help but be reminded of a passage from Al Franken's 2005 The Truth:

So not only was Bush inventing a mandate...[he also] intended to use his imaginary political capital to lay waste to the very pillars of middle-class prosperity...I swore then and there, if memory serves, to fight this bastard every step of the way.

We've seen this story before. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, only won the electoral college on the back of a deeply controversial Supreme Court ruling, and nevertheless advanced what was universally understood on the contemporary liberal-left as a radically partisan, norm-shattering agenda. When he narrowly won again in 2004, he claimed a mandate and immediately took aim at one of the core institutions of American liberalism, Social Security. The GOP pursued all of this with zero regard for the niceties of liberal proceduralism, demolishing en route a whole range of executive, parliamentary and judicial norms and practices that have never recovered.

And what did the Democrats do once they got in power? Almost immediately, Obama insisted that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." There was no counter-revolution. Even Obamacare, their most ambitious effort, was (as Beutler himself puts it) "by no means norm-shattering"; it was modeled after Romneycare and passed through ordinary parliamentary procedures.

The reason for this is simple: liberals are ideologically committed to procedural democratic pluralism in a way that the American right is not. Their priority is not the enactment of policy; their priority is adherence to a set of norms and processes and practices which they define as "good governance", and if this so-happens to achieve certain political outcomes, that's an added benefit. Compare this vision of politics with that of the so-called alt-right - or as Stop The Spirit of Zossen called them in 2009, the Movement:

[T]he Movement within the conservative base always plays a different game for a different prize. The Movement may speak in normal political talking points from ‘Republican’ institutions. Yet it isn’t not committed to Dahl-esque pluralistic politics. It has never sought or tolerated compromise or ‘moderation’. That’s because for the Movement, politics is existential warfare. Compromise is defeat.

The hard right has only become more explicit about this since then. But consider how Obama discussed American politics in his farewell speech:

Understand, democracy does not require uniformity. Our founders argued. They quarreled. They compromised. They expected us to do the same.

That is the spirit of modern liberalism. And it's exactly what we can expect from our liberal Democrats even if they take back power, because this is what they believe in. Near the conclusion of his piece, Beutler insists that

There are good reasons, other than respect for norms and comity, why Democrats didn't [pursue a maximal agenda] in 2009...

Perhaps the new number will be 2020 - perhaps it'll be 2024. But either way, expect to see that sentence again.

Among my overwhelmingly leftist readership, one out of every eight respondents rejects a fundamental moral premise of Marxist politics. This will surprise no one, but it does set in sharp contrast the almost complete absence of controversy over this heresy. We do not hear constant calls for a purge of the crypto-capitalist deviationists. We do not hear recriminations about the enablers of deviationists who, by refusing to take a vocal and public stand against them, are themselves abetting capitalism. We don't see outraged denunciations of anyone who shares an article from The New York Times, which, by the way, publishes capitalist agitprop constantly. And we certainly do not see aggressive demands that deviationists must be shunned and blacklisted and social-media-unfollowed into oblivion.

From this, I can only conclude one of two things:

1) Our left disciplinarians are not actually committed to purging (and similar tactics) as a matter of principle; they do not think that leftist orthodoxy should be enforced consistently, and do not think that such disciplinary tactics are always productive; or

2) Our left disciplinarians are not actually left at all - they are standard liberal capitalists who reject Marx's critique of capitalism and do not see a role for class in their intersectionality.

I'm not sure how one avoids arriving at one conclusion or the other. You simply cannot look at the disciplinarians who so piously police modern leftist orthodoxy and conclude that these people also care about Marx. Don't take my word for it - just look at anyone calling for purging, blacklisting, or shunning on other grounds, and then look for the last time they took the same kind of principled stand against capitalists.

Just one man's opinion here, but if you ask me, capitalism is a gruesome, murderous ideology that's responsible for more death and suffering than just about anything else you can name. The victims of capitalism are violently oppressed and exploited every day: they're robbed of their dignity, they're degraded and humiliated, they're broken down into serious mental and physical illness, they're perpetually threatened with poverty, and all the while they're robbed of their time and labor. The notion that the victims of capitalism have no right to defend themselves against this - violently, if necessary - is one of the most privileged, heartless, and reactionary positions I can imagine.

So given the utter ubiquity of calls to discipline on the left these days, I think it's worth reflecting on the clear and complete apathy our disciplinarians maintain towards this central point of leftism. And one way to make it an issue is to simply bring it up whenever our disciplinarians ignore it and want to talk about something else. Just guessing here, but I suspect these folks are going to be suddenly very hesitant to call out and purge 14% of their comrades, for obvious reasons.

Lately I've been working my way through Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler, an anthropological study of the relationship between inequality and violence. In his discussion of the ancient roots of inequality, Scheidel references a fascinating 2015 paper called "Cereals, Appropriability, and Hierarchy", which argues that

the development of social hierarchy following the Neolithic Revolution was the outcome of the ability of the emergent elite to appropriate crops from farmers. Cereals, for which storage is feasible and required, are easier to confiscate than...[any type of crop which] isn't stored and rots shortly after harvest...

This point of anthropology touches on something deeper, Scheidel argues: "inequality and its persistence over time has been the result of...how suitable [assets] are for passing on to others". If your wealth consists of something that can be endlessly hoarded, and even passed on to subsequent generations, then enduring inequality becomes possible; otherwise, being rich just means having a temporary windfall until your wealth inevitably goes away.

What's interesting about this finding is the way it substantiates a long-held but mostly theoretical critique of the way money works in capitalism. As Gesell wrote in 1913,

Commodities in general...can be safely exchanged only when everyone is indifferent as to whether he possesses money or goods, and that is possible only if money is afflicted with all the defects inherent in our products. That is obvious. Our goods rot, decay, break, rust, so only if money has equally disagreeable, loss-involving properties can it effect exchange...No one can any longer interfere with public monetary administration by putting into circulation or withdrawing private reserves of money.

That last observation is central to Gesell's argument: make money decay just like the commodities that it is exchanged for, and you return the economy to equillibrium by undercutting the incentive to hoard. And the corrolary, it seems, is proven by Scheidel's anthropological argument: the more hoardable your wealth is, the more inequality you get. David Harvey, in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism:

While the utopian aim of a social order without exchange value and therefore moneyless needs to be articulated, the intermediate step of designing quasi-money forms that facilitate exchange but inhibit the private accumulation of social wealth and power becomes imperative...With electronic moneys, this is not practicable, in ways that were not possible before. An oxidisation schedule can easily be written into monetary accounts such that unused moneys (like unused airline miles) dissolve after a certain period of time.

Harvey goes on to explain how this approach to monetary policy is still compatible with various social and policy goals we presently achieve through investment - though "moves of this sort would require wide-ranging adjustments of other facets of the economy." Whether the left chooses to pursue demurrage as a policy solution is mostly, in my view, a question of tactics; regardless, it's worth noting how the emerging scholarship about relationships between depreciation and inequality substantiates insights that anticapitalists have maintained for over a century.

During the debates leading up to the passage of Obamacare, Republicans settled in early November 2009 on a new messaging strategy: Obamacare exploited young Americans. Cato's Aaron Yelowitz laid out the case: Obama's health care bill

would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds - who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults.

...the law artificially holds down premiums for older people and raises the price for the young...the insurance companies have no choice but to pass the health-care costs of older people on to the young in the form of higher premiums.

Obamacare is asking young adults to effectively subsidize the healthcare costs of older Americans. So far, Millennials are resisting this age-based transfer of wealth.

There are a million articles like this, particularly in right-wing publications, and they all invoke age-based transfers as a reason for young people to be skeptical of Obamacare.

The Republican alternative
Today, we got our first glimpse of what is evidently going to pass for the Republican "alternative" - and among other stipulations,

The Republican plan would offer tax credits ranging from $2,000 per year for those under 30 to $4,000 per year for those over $60.

If this is not an age-based wealth transfer from the young to the old, I don't know what is. Like Obamacare, the Republican alternative also includes some circumstantial and income-based adjustments that offset some of the more regressive effects of this formula. Nevertheless, the basic redistribution from young to old remains, which is why this stipulation exists in the first place. All this new plan does is make the ageism much more explicit.

Young people should blame capitalism
Health care policy presents an excellent case-study in how capitalism engineers ageist outcomes in our society.

At its heart, health care provision is a redistribution problem: some people are less able to afford health care than others. The direct solution would be to simply transfer the medium of health care access (wealth) from those who have it (the rich) from those who do not (the poor). This is the general form of socialized health care, which typically funds access to all by disproportionately taxing the rich.

Since capitalism frowns on wealth-based redistribution, however, our health care policy has to engineer all kinds of indirect workarounds that approximate a similar outcome. And while there are all kinds of ways you can do this, an obvious approach is to redistribute money from the young to the elderly. The elderly generally need more health care than the young, and the young generally have more income than the elderly; thus, an ageist redistribution scheme will at least imperfectly replicate what you would achieve by basing your redistribution on wealth. But only imperfectly - it does not, for example, help you to avoid the ageist injustice of a poor young person paying for the health care of a rich old man.

That's why, even in the Republican health care plan, the ageist redistribution mechanism has to be offset with income-based adjustments. Ultimately, the GOP is vulnerable to the same accusation of ageism as Obamacare was, and it only manages to escape this insofar as it abandons capitalism and indulges in wealth-based redistribution. Democrats would do well to target this political liability - but this attack only works if they abandon Obamacare and embrace the redistribution of wealth.

Earlier this week I wrote a piece on the odious campaign to blacklist independent journalist Rania Khalek. One recurring point of criticism I've encountered, in response, objects to my characterization of blacklisting as "violent". Even if we suppose that blacklisting is coercive, we are told, this still should not be equated with "real violence" or "physical violence"; this is a category error, and drawing such an equivalence threatens to trivialize our understanding of what violence actually is.

Here, I want to take on this line of criticism, because I think it is important for socialists to understand how it gets our situation completely backwards. It is capitalism that trivializes our conception of violence, narrowing the definition so as to exclude itself and draw our attention away from the very real, physical, and aggressive operation of our economy. The task of the socialist is not to reify these ideological boundaries, but to push back against them, and expose how capitalism is literal violence in every meaningful sense of the word.

With that in mind, consider the following three ways in which capitalism necessarily relies on - and denies - things that we would in any other situation understand as violence.

1. Private property is violent

We are born into a world where nature and its bounty are, by default, accessible to all. In this state of nature, I can go anywhere I like. If I am tired, I can lie down wherever I am. If I am thirsty, I can drink any fresh water that I can find. If I am hungry, I can look for a wild fruit or I can start a garden or I can kill a rabbit. The commonwealth is a gift from God, or it is the legacy of cosmic evolution; either way, it equally belongs to everyone. In philosophy, this situation is something like what the Enlightenment philosophers called "the state of nature", or what Roderick Long and Matt Bruenig refer to as "grab-what-you-can world".

Historically, people have for all kinds of familiar reasons found this arrangement impractical; most vexingly, we run into problems when two people want to use the same resource, be it land, food, water, or something else. Thats's why capitalism has come up with an elaborate set of rules dictating who may lay claim to any given resource in any given situation - rules that we call "property rights".

As Prodhoun teaches us, what these property rights really are is a threat of violence. If I say that a plot of land is my property, what I am really doing is declaring my right (either personally, or through agents of the state) to physically prevent you from using it. Crucially, even when this right is not exercised, the threat is implicit; capitalism only works when we are constantly aware of this threat and are cowed by it.

This is violence. Capitalist ideology offers all kinds of reasons why property should not be understood as a violent institution - most explicitly, through the so-called "non-aggression principle" - but going by any ordinary meaning of the term, it is certainly violent to threaten to physically coerce someone against their will. Whether this violence is justified is another matter.

2. Contracts are violent

We are born into the world with absolute freedom to bargain with each other and make deals. By default, however, we are also able to break deals. I can, for example, promise to weed your garden if you give me a bite of your apple - and then, once I've eaten the apple, I can change my mind and decide not to weed your garden after all. There are lots of reasons why we may generally consider this to be inappropriate and immoral behavior, but it is certainly not impossible behavior.

In order to prevent people from breaking deals, capitalism relies on something called a "contract". Much like "property", a "contract" is really just a threat of violence: what it says is that if you try to break our deal, I can physically compel you to comply, or I can exact some kind of alternative compensation, again using physical force if necessary. It is, again, the very real threat of violence that makes a contract work, and capitalism needs that threat.

Again, it may be the case that the violence at the heart of contract law is completely justified; the anarchy of a world where everyone can change their mind about deals may be so immoral and unworkable that we are better off maintaining order by constantly threatening each other. Still, this rationale doesn't somehow nullify the existence of violence - it simply maintains that some violent threats are good and necessary.

3. Market activism is violent

Historically, the liberal-left has noticed that capitalism's system of property and contracts often facilitates outcomes that we would prefer to avoid. The left, definitionally, understands this as a problem with the system itself, and advocates subordinating property and contract to democratic sovereignty. If, that is, the violence of contracts and property rights becomes unacceptable to society, leftists reserve the right to nullify them through democratic referendum.

Liberals, in contrast, reject democratic sovereignty, and insist that capitalism's system of violent threats must ultimately be honored. Liberals believe that we can mitigate or nullify capitalism's adverse outcomes while still playing by capitalism's rules. This is the logic of conscientious consumption, employment selectivity, boycotts, and blacklists; in all of these cases, activists are still respecting contract law and property rights, and in fact what they hope to do is leverage the violence of those institutions towards positive outcomes.

Return, for example, to the strategy of blacklisting. The goal of a blacklist is to prevent someone from entering into employment contracts, which in turn cuts off their access to resources they need to survive and maintain a reasonable standard of living. Clearly, this strategy cannot work without property rights; otherwise access to necessities would not be cut off, because one could always just take what one needs. For this reason, blacklisting requires activists to not only maintain property rights, but to leverage their violent threats against the target. If you are blacklisted, you are threatened with a dangerous choice: either comply and regain access to the labor market, or steal necessities and risk the violent enforcement of property rights.

Once again, it may very well be the case that blacklisting can be on a case-by-case basis good and necessary, just like boycotts can be good and necessary. Only absolute pacifists deny that violence can be justified under particular circumstances. Nevertheless, whenever we are engaged in market activism, we should always be clear about what it is that we are actually doing. When we deny the violence at the heart of such efforts, we are denying the violence of property rights and contract law, and we participate in capitalist ideology's effort to veil them. Socialism does not deny the necessity of violence in ordering our world, but it does demand that we acknowledge it for what it is - and to minimize it as much as possible.